Inner City High School – Cleveland and Chalmers Street, Surry Hills
In order to address the tight space constraints of a typical inner-city development and to meet the needs of a growing community, SINSW embarked on an innovative project to construct a 14-storey vertical high school building, accommodating 1,200 students. The purpose-built building contains flexible learning spaces which supports technology-rich settings and an evolving curriculum.
This project provided our team with many technical challenges relating to the space constraints, heritage considerations, protected fig trees, extensive sewer and stormwater issues, achieving the acoustic ratings in close proximity to major road infrastructure and designing spaces with large clear open-span structures over sporting facilities (the basketball court needed to be located in the basement as to give access to the community on the weekends). Our vertical transport team also worked closely with the Department of Education early on, in order to understand student timetables and movements to help solve the logistical challenge of moving 1200 students around the building.
Construction was completed in late 2020 and the school was opened for Term 1 in 2021. Our team enjoyed being part of such an innovative project and tackling the design and site challenges, alongside the architect (FJMT) and builder (Hansen Yuncken) throughout, as well as creating inspired learning spaces for current and future students.